Oracle E Business Suite R12 Integration and OA Framework Development and Extension Cookbook
Oracle E-Business
Suite R12 Integration
and OA Framework Development and Extension Cookbook A practical step-by-step guide to develop end-to-end extensions to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, with detailed illustrations and explanations Andy PenverBIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Integration and
OA Framework Development and Extension
CookbookCopyright © 2013 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First published: March 2013 Production Reference: 1140313 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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Credits Author Project Coordinator
Andy Penver Anish Ramchandani
Reviewers Proofreaders Parvez Achhwa Aaron NashBrian Badenhorst Linda Morris Stephen Phillips Indexer Hemangini Bari
Acquisition Editor Rukhsana Khambatta Production Coordinator Conidon Miranda
Lead Technical Editors Suchi Singhal Cover Work Sruthi Kutty
Conidon Miranda Technical Editors Prasad Dalvi Amit Ramadas About the Author
currently lives and works in the U.K. as a solution architect for a large
Andy Penver
public sector client. He studied at Christ Church (University of Kent). He has over 18 years of experience in working with Oracle E-Business Suite. He has worked in both the private and public sectors, and has a strong technical background. He has led and managed teams of consultants through the full project lifecycles on some very large programs throughout the U.K. and Europe. Andy has been heavily involved in two large-scale, award-winning implementations of a shared service centre.
Andy is currently the Managing Director of his own consultancy, NU-TEKK Limited. Andy has previously authored and published a book called Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Core Development and Extension Cookbook.
I would like to thank my parents, my wife and three children, SJ, James, and Jack for their understanding and support while I spent many hours and late nights on the book. I would also like to thank my colleagues for their help in reviewing and commenting on the material in the book. In particular, I would like to thank Brian Badenhorst, Steve Phillips, and Parvez who all have helped me in some way to produce this book.
About the Reviewers
has more than 22 years of experience in information systems
Parvez Achhwa
technologies, with the last 17 years in Oracle Apps 11i/12i (CRM and Financials) implementation, BI, Business Process Automation, and management of large-scale projects. He is a rare breed to possess both functional and technical skills at various landscapes. In recent years, he has also developed Siebel implementation skills. Presently, he is working with DAMAC Holding as Oracle ERP Manager.
I would like to thank Andy for giving me the opportunity to review this book.
Brian Badenhorst works as an Oracle E-Business Consultant and has over 10 years
of experience in designing and developing robust solutions for a range of clients in both the UK private and public sectors. Backed by an engineering background, he has the ability to put forward strategic solutions and he has significant experience in fulfilling bespoke requirements.
Brian works as a freelance consultant and is the Managing Director of his own business. This is the first book that Brian has been involved in. was born in London in 1959 and moved to Australia in 1969 when his
Stephen Phillips
family emigrated. He studied Computer Science at the University of Melbourne and has worked in IT in both Australia and the U.K. for over 30 years. He began his career at the Government Computing Service (GCS) in Melbourne, Australia in 1981, working on Burroughs mainframes. Since that time he has worked in all scales of equipment and on projects ranging from large-scale implementations of Oracle HRMS to small PC-based systems for a single client.
Stephen has worked extensively with Oracle software since 1989 and moved back to London in 1994 in order to broaden his experience. Since his return to the U.K. he has worked for a number of prestigious clients, including Oracle UK, Reuters, Lloyds TSB, Walkers Snack Foods, The John Lewis Partnership, and the Ministry of Justice. Stephen has worked on Data Migration projects with a number of these clients, as part of their implementation of Oracle HRMS/Payroll. In 2003, Stephen completed the MSc degree with the Open University. The major area of his dissertation was artificial intelligence, as applied to the compiling of public transport timetables.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Personalizing OA Framework Pages
Table of Contents
Chapt
Chapt
Chapt
Chapt
Table of Contents
Chapter 7
Chapt
Preface Extending Oracle E-Business Suite
This book is about the ways in which we can extend Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) and focuses on more recent tools and technology. Its primary focus is to show how we can integrate with EBS, personalize and develop OA Framework pages with EBS, and to show how we can use BI Publisher to create and mail merge documents within EBS. The book has many detailed examples to work through with tips and explanations about how various components can be configured and how we can extend standard functionality and the various ways in which we can do it. It complements my first book, Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Core
Development and Extension Cookbook, which focuses on writing concurrent programs,
the personalization and development of professional forms, creating workflows, and using common utilities and scripts within EBS. This book is aimed at developers who are new to E-Business Suite, or those who are strong in one particular area and need to expand their knowledge in other areas. Experienced developers may also use the book to brush up on their skills, or to pick up tips that may help them. The book focuses on the newer technologies being used in the more recent releases of EBS. There are plenty of detailed screenshots throughout each chapter giving clear instructions. This helps to provide a clear and full understanding of what we are doing and why. Each topic will develop a solution to a scenario, and will show how we need to set up our development tools right through to deploying it within EBS. At the end of each chapter, the reader should have developed a good understanding of the topic and will be able to take away the knowledge gained and start using it in practice. The book also comes with complete, fully-tested code and scripts that can be downloaded. The examples have been developed using a Vision instance of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (12.1.1). It would be helpful to know some SQL, PL/SQL, XML, and Java, but it is not essential, as the code is already written and fully documented. We will be going through each chapter example step-by-step, so you will not be expected to write any code that is not detailed in the book.
Preface
If you are new to Oracle EBS or a consultant who has worked with Oracle E-Business Suite before, you will be aware that there are many technical components to consider; there are many features using a range of different tools and the footprint seems to be expanding all the time. One of the key features of EBS is its flexibility. Not all organizations are the same and there are many ways you can configure EBS to make it specific to an organization’s needs. Whenever possible, an organization should always attempt to use standard functionality to meet their requirements. However, there are occasions where business requirements cannot be met using the standard Oracle-provided functionality, and this can be anything from renaming a label on a screen, to automating a process that would take many hours for someone to process manually.
There are various ways in which you can change behavior in Oracle EBS. The simplest way to change behavior is through configuration. For example, extending Oracle through profile options, value sets, descriptive flexfields are ways to extend applications through configuration. In addition, Oracle also gives us the ability to change Oracle OA Framework pages through personalization. It is a powerful feature that allows us to change behavior without needing to change any standard objects. These are mechanisms provided by Oracle to change how the application looks, or how the application behaves. On the other hand, there are some extensions that require writing code, creating new objects, or even extending or replacing existing objects. These types of extensions are in addition to the code or objects that Oracle delivers.
A powerful feature of Oracle is the ability to extend EBS, but when doing this, there is a strict set of development standards that must be adhered to. There are two primary ways to modify Oracle EBS; the first is customization by extension, as we have just described, and the second is customization by modification. Customization by modification is where standard objects are changed, meaning that the change needs to be reapplied when a newer version of the object is released by Oracle.
Customizations by modification are not supported by Oracle and should always be avoided. There are rarely occasions where there is a real business justification for a customization by modification. There are often alternatives, such as exploring other solutions or looking at ways to change the requirements or processes. It is important to understand the difference between customization by extension and customization by modification, as the two terms are often used loosely. When we extend Oracle EBS by supported methods, the standard functionality is still supported by Oracle as it has not been amended by the extension, whereas customization by modifying a standard object means the standard object also becomes unsupported by them.
2
Preface
A worthwhile feature of Oracle EBS is that it uses a common toolset and also has a vast amount of documentation written about the supported ways in which you can extend the product. The first place to start would be the Oracle Release 12 Documentation Library. This provides many documents, all relating to Oracle EBS. Another essential resource is Oracle Support (previously known as Metalink), which is a portal provided by Oracle for support, documentation, white papers, and patches among many other things related to EBS. To access the portal, you need to register and you also need to provide a support identifier, which is only provided when there is a support contract with Oracle Support. So, if you are new to EBS or if you have been around for a while, you can nearly always find examples or documentation relating to your specific requirement. There are nearly always numerous business processes and solutions available to satisfy it. The best way to provide a solution is to have an understanding of what options are available. Having knowledge of the various ways in which we can extend EBS will give us a much better chance of coming up with better solutions. This book will provide recipes that will cover some simple and some more complex solutions. It will utilize a majority of the Oracle toolset and will, hopefully, broaden your knowledge. Expanding our knowledge of the toolset will allow us to provide a more varied set of solutions, resulting in having a better chance of providing a better, more robust solution for a given problem.
Understanding the EBS architecture
Before we really get into the book it is important to understand the E-Business Suite architecture in Release 12. We need to understand where the files are kept and how it is installed. If you are a beginner, you will need this information to understand some key concepts and pick up some terminology that is often used when we discuss Oracle EBS.
In Release 12, there has been a significant change in the file system when it is installed. The change quite simply is used to segregate code, data, and configuration. This makes maintenance much easier. There will be a number of terms that you will encounter regularly when we discuss EBS. A server is a term for a number of processes that provide specific functionality on a single machine. A tier is a term used to describe a logical group of services, which can be on one or more physical machine. A machine is used to describe a computer or group of computers. A node is a group of computers that work closely together as a cluster.
Essentially, there are three tiers per instance of EBS. The Database Tier (DB Tier), the Application Tier (APPS Tier), and the Desktop Tier. The desktop tier is the client interface where users will connect to Oracle EBS through a web browser. When Oracle is first used, the browser will install a J2SE plugin which will use Oracle’s own Java Virtual Machine (JVM) rather than the browser's own JVM. The application tier (also known as the middle tier) processes all of the business logic. It comprises of three servers or service groups. These are Web Services which process requests from the desktop client. Then there are the Forms services which manage all of the listening and secure requests for Oracle forms. Then there is the concurrent processing server, which processes concurrent requests that are submitted.
3
Preface When Oracle EBS is installed on all variants of UNIX, the install is performed by the root user.
However, as part of the installation process there will be two OS users. One that will own the application node file system (the applmgr user) and the other will own the database node file system (the oracle user). When installed on Windows, there is one OS user that owns the file system. The following diagram shows the basic architecture:
Oracle EBS Release12
Desktop Applications Tier DB TierTier Browser Concurrent Forms/
(Java Web Server Reports Server Processing Oracle DB
Admin Server Plugin) (10.1.3) (10.1.2)
The directory structure of the Application Tier and Database Tier will help to understand where the files are stored. The following directory structure should help to understand where various files are stored within EBS:
APPS Tier apps_st tech_st
INSTANCE_TOP
Configuration APPL_TOP COMN_TOP
10.1.3
10.1.2 files, logfiles and certificates Scripts, log
Product Oracle Homes for the applications files, output Directories tech stack and HTML files
4
Preface
The following shows the directory structures of some core directories on the Applications Tier:
Profile Directory Description APPL_TOP /apps_st/appl This directory is the base directory where all of the product tops are stored. AU_TOP/forms/US /apps_st/appl/au/12.0.0/forms/ This directory is where all forms are
US stored.
This directory is AU_TOP/resource /apps_st/appl/au/12.0.0/ resource where all libraries are stored.
COMMON_TOP /apps/apps_st/comn This is the base directory for scripts, log files, output files, and HTML files.
ORACLE_HOME /apps_st/10.1.2 This is the directory
structure for the forms' server files.iAS_ORACLE_HOME /apps_st/10.1.3 This is the directory
structure for the web server files.INSTANCE_TOP /inst/apps/<CONTEXT_NAME> This is the top directory for the configuration files. ADMIN_SCRIPTS_ /inst/apps/<CONTEXT>/admin/ This is where
HOME scripts admin scripts are
stored to start and stop services.The following table describes where the files are stored on the Database Tier:
Profile Directory Description
ORACLE_HOME /db/tech_st/10.2.0 This directory is the base
directory where all of the database files are stored.Data Files /db/apps_st/data This directory is the base
directory where all of the data files are stored.5
Preface
Within EBS, each product has its own database user within Oracle. The user will own the objects that store data, such as tables. This is in the form of an abbreviation of the product (AP for Account Payables and HR for Human Resources for example) and is referred to as a schema. The passwords are, by default, the same as the schema name, but this is nearly always changed after install. On the file system on the APPS tier, each product has its own file system. The file system has the same root directory as the product \ user name in Oracle. For example, there will be a directory structure for Payables (AP) that has a root directory of AP_TOP. There is one very important schema called the APPS schema. The apps schema owns all of the code, such as packages, triggers, views, java classes. Each product user has grants providing access to the APPS schema for all of its objects. Therefore, the APPS schema has access to all of the objects, that is the code and the objects owned by the product schemas. It is important that as a developer, you can access the APPS database schema. All objects that you will require access to are accessible from this schema. When we create custom objects, we need to create a custom schema and all of the data storing objects will reside in this schema. Usually, an on-site DBA will perform this task, but we will go through this in one of the recipes we have. If you would like to understand more relating to the core concepts of EBS, you can get more detailed information from the Oracle Applications Concepts Release 12 from the Release12 Documentation Library. You can get the documentation from Oracle by following this link .
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B53825_08/current/html/docset.html Before we start
One final word before we get into the recipes. Hopefully, you will find the book extremely useful. There are thousands of pages written about how to extend and customize Oracle E-Business Suite. This book is not going to cover every solution to every problem. In fact, it will not even come close. The recipes are designed to take us through the different features of the tools and extensions that you may need to utilize in your own solutions. Use the book to get a feel for how each tool and product can be used. It will provide a core understanding of how things can be done and the standards that we need to adhere to. You will need to expand on what you learn here and apply the knowledge you gain to design a solution or solutions to your own scenarios. I personally am a great believer of learning through practice. Expanding your knowledge by understanding the fundamentals is essential to providing the best solutions. Oracle uses many tools and technologies in its suite of applications, of which there is too much to cover in this book.
6
Preface What this book covers
Chapter 1, Personalizing OA Framework Pages, looks at some recipes that will implement
personalizations to an OA framework page. We will look at a number of different types of personalization and the levels at which we can create personalizations. At the end of the chapter, readers will have an understanding of how we can personalize OA framework pages in EBS. Readers will understand which responsibilities are used to administer personalizations and which profile options need to be changed to view the personalization links. Throughout the chapter, we will be creating a variety of different examples that will give a broad understanding of what we can achieve through personalizing OA framework pages.
Chapter 2, Getting Started with OA Framework Pages, deals with the creation of OA Framework pages. We start off by looking at the architecture of OA Framework pages as it is
important to understand this before we start any development. Further, we will go through the process of setting up our development environment and what we will need to do to get up and running. Towards the end of the chapter readers will have an understanding of the components required to develop and test an OA Framework page.
Chapter 3, Creating a Master Detail Page in OA Framework, will explain the process of
creating a master detail page in the OA Framework. Readers will have an understanding of how we can create master detail pages in the OA framework. Finally, we will go through the process of deploying our page in Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) and running it through the application.
Chapter 4, Adding a Creation Page and LOV Region in OA Framework, explains how to
make changes to the OA Framework pages we have created. This chapter gives the readers an understanding of how they can create pages that interact with the database. We will also know how to use the debugger that is provided in JDeveloper.
Chapter 5, Advanced OA Framework, helps in learning some more advanced features of OA Framework pages which includes a lot more coding. The chapter will continue to develop the pages we have worked on so far. Chapter 6, BI Publisher, looks at recipes that will explain how BI Publisher integrates with E-Business Suite to allow us to generate formatted data with a very feature rich output. We will
look at how it integrates with commonly used desktop applications, such as Microsoft Word and Excel. At the end of the chapter, readers will understand how to set up our development environments. We will learn to create our report templates, and how to generate the XML data that the template requires to produce a report output in a number of different formats. We will look at how the report mail merges the data with Word documents, and how we can use a feature called Bursting to send formatted documents out by e-mail.
7
Preface
Chapter 7, Desktop Integration, looks at how we can integrate with E-Business Suite using the
desktop integrator. Oracle E-Business Suite provides a framework that allows us to integrate with Microsoft Office-based tools. It is called Web ADI (Application Desktop Integrator). Users tend to be in favor of using the tools, as it integrates with the Microsoft Office tools we are all used to working with. At the end of this chapter readers will learn how we can use Excel-based spreadsheets to view and upload data to EBS. We will understand how data can be validated, and how we can include structured data entry methods, such as lists of values and drop down lists to spreadsheets. We will understand how we can create a new integrator to upload data and how to assign an integrator to a responsibility.
Chapter 8, Utilities
, looks at a number of utilities that you will find extremely useful. We will show how to create a custom schema and how to configure it on EBS. We will also look at ways to use common utilities, which will reduce risk and save enormous amounts of time. Usually, the biggest reason for problems when migrating extensions or configuration is when there are human tasks. We will also look at how to start and stop an environment.
What you need for this book
Oracle uses many great tools to develop extensions. The tools we will mostly focus on in this book are the following:
f Oracle JDeveloper with OA Extension f SQL Developer f BI Publisher f Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Word
Other utility programs we will be using are:
f WinSCP — a windows based FTP frontend f PuTTY — a UNIX command line window f JAD - a Java decompiler
Developing code in EBS
There are a number of languages used for programming and writing scripts that Oracle supports. We are going to primarily focus on the following in this book:
f PL/SQL f Java f SQL f
XML
8
Preface UNIX shell scripting
Other languages are also less commonly used within EBS and fall outside the scope of this book.
Who this book is for
This book is written for individuals who want to learn how to develop extensions in Oracle E-Business Suite. If you are involved in development or supporting an E-Business Suite implementation, you should find this book very useful. The book gives detailed explanations, so minimal technical expertise is required. It is suitable for beginners who have little experience, or developers who may want to use the book to brush up on their skills.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning. Code words in text are shown as follows: “You may also notice that there is also a ZIP file called provided in the code bundle.”
oafch2.zip
A block of code is set as follows:
SELECT flv.lookup_code, flv.meaning FROM fnd_lookup_values flv WHERE flv.lookup_type = ‘XXHR_SOCIETY_LOV’
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$JAVA_TOP/<customFolder>/oracle/apps/<ApplicationShortName>/<moduleName>/
<subModuleName>/webuiNew terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: “Obtain the version of EBS you are on. To do this, log on to EBS and click on the About this Page link.”.
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tips and tricks appear like this.
9
Preface Reader feedback
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11
1 Personalizing OA Framework Pages
In this chapter we will cover:
f Getting started with personalizations f
Setting the personalization profile options
f Discovering information about a page f Clearing the cache f Creating a user-level personalization f Adding tool tips f Creating an item f Re-ordering items on a page f Adding a button to a page f Hiding a button on a page f
Making a field required
f
Adding a flexfield to a page
f Using SPEL to trigger personalizations f Deactivating personalizations f Deleting personalizations
Personalizing OA Framework Pages Introduction
OA Framework pages have been implemented using an object-oriented design approach that allows us to be pretty flexible when it comes to making changes to the user interface. The objects that we see on each page are made up of smaller objects that are stored independently in a repository called Meta Data Service (MDS).
In this chapter, we will discuss how to make changes to the user interface through personalization. When we personalize a page, we are altering the declaration of a page's interface. At runtime, objects are loaded from the repository and are rendered in a browser. What we see is determined by the metadata definition, which specifies how objects are displayed on the page. We can create a personalization at multiple levels such as site, function, organization, or responsibility. The good thing is that they can be configured directly from the UI page and are likely to survive an upgrade, as opposed to extensions. One thing you cannot modify with personalizations is the business logic. At the end of this chapter, readers will have an understanding of how we can personalize OA Framework pages in EBS. Readers will understand which responsibilities are used to administer personalizations and which profile options need to be changed to view the personalization links. Throughout this chapter, we will be creating a variety of different examples that will give a broad understanding of what we can achieve through personalizing OA Framework pages.
Getting started with personalizations
It is important that we understand some common terminology and gain an understanding of how an OA Framework page is constructed before we get started. Let's start off by understanding that OA Framework has been developed by Oracle and is based upon a Model View Controller (MVC) architecture developed using Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE).
f Model: A model can be thought of as the data and is implemented using Oracle
Business Components for Java (BC4J). This comprises three layers, which are the entity object (EO), view object (VO), and application module (AM).
Entity object: This is based upon a database table and all of the database transactions will go through the EO. View object: This is based upon any number of entity objects or it can be an SQL statement, if the page is read only. Application module: This is a container for the view object and it
manages transactions that occur. Each page has a root AM to maintain the transaction context.
f View: A view
defines a user interface that is rendered as an HTML page. This is implemented with user interface XML (UIX). f Controller: A controller is java code that handles events when they occur at runtime. There are two methods that are called when the page runs.
In this recipe, we are going to set up some records that we will use throughout the chapter. We are going to demonstrate our personalizations in the manager self-service screens. We will need to perform the following tasks before we get started with personalizing OA Framework pages:
f Creating a custom responsibility f Creating a new user f Creating an employee record f Assigning a manager f Attaching an employee to a user record
Creating a custom responsibility
Now to create our new responsibility that we will use to access core HR screens, we will create a test employee record and ensure that the employee is a manager of other employees. This will be used to access some of the self-service screens where we will create some personalizations in the upcoming recipes.
How to do it...
Perform the following steps to create a new responsibility called
XX Test HRMS Manager
: 1. Log in to Oracle E-Business with the System Administrator responsibility.
2. Navigate to Security | Responsibility | Define and the Responsibilities window will open.
3. Enter the required data as given in the following table:
Item name Item value Responsibility Name
XX Test HRMS Manager Application Human Resources Responsibility Key
XXTESTHRMSMGR Description
XX Test HRMS Manager Data Group Name Standard Application Human Resources Menu GLB HRMS Navigator Request Group
Name HR Reports and Processes
Personalizing OA Framework Pages 4. Click on the Save button in the toolbar (or press Ctrl + S) to save the record.
5. The Responsibilities screen should now appear as shown in the following screenshot:
6. Now create a test manager self-service responsibility.
7. Click on the new record icon.
8. Enter the required data as given in the following table:
Item name Item value Responsibility Name
XX Test Manager Self-Service Application Human Resources Responsibility Key
XXTESTMGRSS Description
XX Test Manager Self-Service Data Group Name Standard Application Human Resources Menu Manager Self Service Request Group Name
Chapter 1 9. Click on the Save button in the toolbar (or press Ctrl + S) to save the record.
2. Navigate to Security | User | Define.
6. Set Password Expiration to None.
5. Enter the password again and press the Tab key.
4. Enter a password in the Password field and press the Tab key.
in the User Name field.
XXUSER
3. Enter
10. Exit the form.
How it works...
How to do it...
that we will use throughout the chapter for our personalizations. We will add the responsibilities, that we will use throughout the chapter. Also, the user will be assigned an employee record so that when we access the manager self-service screens, there is relevant data available for our personalizations that we are going to create.
XXUSER
We are going to create a user called
Creating a new user
We have now created a new responsibility where we can access the HRMS screens.
To create the user, perform the following steps: 1. Log in to Oracle and select the System Administrator responsibility.
Personalizing OA Framework Pages 7. Navigate to the Direct Responsibilities tab.
8. Add the following responsibilities:
Application Developer Functional Administrator Manager Self-Service
System Administrator
XX Test HRMS Manager
XX Test Manager Self-Service The Users screen should now appear as shown in the following screenshot: 9. Save the form.
How it works...
We have now created our user called
XXUSER
. The user has access to the responsibilities, which we are going to need throughout the chapter.
Chapter 1 Creating an employee record Now we are going to create an employee called Employee Manager, which we will use
throughout the chapter for our personalizations. As suggested by the name, this employee will be the manager of other employees.
How to do it...
To create the employee, perform the following steps:
1. Log in to Oracle with the
XX Test HRMS Manager
responsibility.2. Navigate to People | Enter and Maintain.
3. When the Find Person screen opens, click on the New button.
4. Enter the required data as given in the following table:
Item name Item value Last Manager First Employee Gender Male (or Female) Action Create Employment Person Type Employee Social Security 123123123 Date of Birth 28-MAR-1970
01-JAN-1990 .
5. Update the Latest Start Date field to
6. Save the record, and when prompted, click on the Correction button.
7. Click on OK, when prompted with the message The original hire date will be updated to be the same as the start date.
8. Make a note of the employee number that has been automatically generated.
If the employee number has not been automatically generated, type one manually and save the record as a Correction.
Personalizing OA Framework Pages
The data entered should look similar to the following screenshot: How it works...
We have now created an employee record that we will configure as the manager of other employees. We need to do this so that the self-service screens we are going to personalize will have some data returned in them and we can complete some of the upcoming recipes.
Assigning a manager
We are now going to update the assignment record of an existing employee so that the employee we have just created is the manager of an existing hierarchy and when we perform some personalizations, there is some data returned in the forms we are going to personalize.
How to do it...
To assign a manger, perform the following steps:
1. In the Enter and Maintain person screen, click on the Find Person (torch) icon in the toolbar.
2. Enter for the employee number.
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Chapter 1 3. Click on the Assignment button.
To create the user, perform the following steps: 1. Select the System Administrator responsibility.
XXUSER , we will be able to access the self-service screens as a manager of other employees.
We have now associated our employee with our user. Therefore, when we log in as our user
How it works...
6. Save the form.
Employee , and press the Tab button.
and
Manager
5. In the Person field enter
in the User Name field and press Ctrl + F11 to execute the query.
XXUSER
4. Enter
3. Press the F11 key to enter a query.
2. Navigate to Security | User | Define.
4. Click on the Supervisor tab.
5. Enter our employee number in the Worker Number field. (The employee number is
responsibility, the self-service screen will display data on the screens appropriate to the employee record that we have associated with our user. As we have assigned our employee record as the manager of other employees, we will see the data of the employees in the screens we are going to access in manager self-service.
XXUSER
When we log in as the
XXUSER .
We are going to associate the employee we have just created to our user called
Attaching an employee to a user record
We have assigned our employee as a manager of another employee. This means that we will then inherit the hierarchy of the employee we became the manager of and hence we will have data in the self-service screens that we are going to personalize.
How it works...
8. Save the form and close it.
7. The Name fields will automatically populate to Manager, Employee, and so on (our test employee), when we tab out of the Worker Number field.
6. Tab out of the field and select the Correction button, if prompted.
for the employee that was created in the preceding recipe. It may be a different number on the environment you are using.)
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How to do it...
Personalizing OA Framework Pages Setting the personalization profile options
There are three profile options that allow us to personalize self-service screens. The three profile options are as follows:
f Personalize Self-Service Defn: When set to Yes, a Personalize Page link will appear
at the top of each self-service page
f FND: Personalization Region Link Enabled: When set to Yes, a Personalize Region
link will appear on each region of a self-service page
f FND: Diagnostics: When set to Yes, an About this Page link will appear at the
bottom of each self-service page How to do it...
To set the three profile options, perform the following steps:
1. Log in to Oracle with
XXUSER and select the Functional Administrator responsibility.
2. Navigate to Core Services | Profiles.
3. In the Name field of the Search screen, type Personalize% .
4. Click on the Go button. You will see that the Personalize Self-Service Defn profile option value is set to No at site level, as shown in the following screenshot (circled):
Chapter 1 We are now
:
XXUSER user
going to update the profile option to Yes at user level for the 1. Click on the Update Value (pencil) icon.
2. Click on the User tab and click on the Add Another Row button: 3. In the User . field, enter the name of our user,
XXUSER
4. Navigate to the Value field and click on the list icon.
5. Click on the Go button.
6. Click on the Quick Select icon for the Yes value as shown in the following screenshot:
Personalizing OA Framework Pages
7. When you are returned to the Profiles screen, click on the Update button and wait for the confirmation that the record has been saved.
8. Now navigate to Core Services | Profiles to return to the profiles screen.
We will now check to see if the value has been set. To do this, perform the following steps:
1. In the Name . field of the Search screen, type Personalize%